Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Deliberate Obesity Pandemic

Time to don the tin-foil constructed, conspiritard food magic cap once again, and point out that there are conspiracy theories and then there are conspiracy facts.

Here's one conspiracy fact - we are in the midst of an obesity pandemic, and it is in fact a pandemic that is deliberately instigated through subsidization by the federal government of USA Inc.

By annually borrowing more money from the Fiat Usury Cartel to exponentially and perpetually increase the compound interest due to further cast the increasingly expanding American serfs into irreconcilable debt bondage, THEY subsidize the Farm Bills for Big Ag Corps to manufacture and distribute the poisonous feed that drives the rise in the numbers of shambling mounds of the malnourished and morbidly sick, lumbering about from sea to shining sea, all across the bloated plains.

The sightings of such specimens are becoming increasingly more common everywhere in our brave new world order. You can find them at almost anytime, any day if you care to go looking for examples of what I'm describing here. They can be found parking there autos in handicap stalls with their State sanctioned placards of parking privilege, to then laboriously waddle over to the motorized shopping carts near the store entrances, so they can then scoot around their local global-corporate cartel distribution center, to load up on more of the processed feed that made them this way in the first place.

But there's far more to this equation than just simply considering the annual Federal Farm Bills passed by the stooges in congress, duly compensated for continuing the subsidizing of the RoundUpReady soy-corn-wheat industrial complex.

No sirree, it is now a virtually enshrined right, an entitlement benefit to ensure the average citizen has the subsidized means to acquire and consume these manufactured products that cause exponential corporeal expansion at an alarming rate.

The frequently condemned subsidized Big Ag farm bills (rightly so!) are only one part of this equation. We have to also consider the EBT/SNAP program and it's junk food "loophole." As one lady wrote into the letters department of the Augusta Chronicle last year, Why does EBT fund junk?

I am totally confused! The government is now regulating the type of food
and fat content in schools. If the government is so concerned about
obesity in young people, then why don’t they place restrictions on food
bought and paid for by government EBT cards?

When I go grocery shopping, I see people in front of me in the checkout
line with carts full of cookies, candy, chips and soft drinks, and they
pull out their EBT cards to pay. All over supermarkets, you see junk
food labeled “EBT-approved.” Why can’t EBT cards be restricted to
nourishing staple foods such as chicken, beans, vegetables, milk, juice
and healthy foods?

I regularly see the same thing here in Hawaii that a flummoxed taxpayer in Georgia notices as well. A commenter on the letter makes the same point I've made many times before:

Why junk food? Higher profit margins and large corporate lobbies. The
individual receiving EBT assistance is only the middleman in the
spending chain -- ultimately EBT money ends up largely in the pockets of
the processed food industry, which has huge lobbying influence and deep
pockets. They buy Congress, Congress makes sure spending continues to
flow to their coffers. Excluding junk food from EBT would withhold money
from heavyweights like Kraft, General Mills, Pepsi/Coke, FritoLay, etc.

Of course, if the likes of Kraft, GM, Pepsi/Coke, FritoLay, Nestle, Nabisco, Sarah Lee, et al are the heavyweights, let's not forget the 30000000 lbs. Godzilla in the room.... but I digress.

Michael Pollan is one guy who's been at the forefront of pointing out the key role the Federal Farm Bill plays in fomenting our deliberately subsidized obesity pandemic for the profits of Big Ag:

It’s an old story: the “hunger lobby” gets its food stamps so long as
the farm lobby can have its subsidies. Similar, if less lavish, terms
are now being offered to the public health and environmental “interests”
to get them on board. That’s why there’s more money in this farm bill
for nutrition programs and, for the first time, about $2 billion to
support “specialty crops” –farm-bill-speak for the kind of food people
actually eat. (Since California grows most of the nation’s specialty
crops, this was the price for the state delegation’s support. Cheap
indeed!)

There’s also money for the environment: an additional $4 billion in
the Senate bill to protect wetlands and grasslands and reward farmers
for environmental stewardship, and billions in the House bill for
environmental cleanup. There’s an important provision in both bills that
will make it easier for schools to buy food from local farmers. And
there’s money to promote farmers’ markets and otherwise support the
local food movement.

But as important as these programs are, they are just programs–mere
fleas on the elephant in the room. The name of that elephant is the
commodity title, the all-important subsidy section of the bill. It
dictates the rules of the entire food system. As long as the commodity
title remains untouched, the way we eat will remain unchanged.

The explanation for this is straightforward. We would not need all
these nutrition programs if the commodity title didn’t do such a good
job making junk food and fast food so ubiquitous and cheap. Food stamps
are crucial, surely, but they will be spent on processed rather than
real food as long as the commodity title makes calories of fat and sugar
the best deal in the supermarket.

....and of course, let us also not forget to include the other profiteers of this great porking-up pandemic, the Banksters 2B2F.

JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United
States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26
U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each
case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on
food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that
correctly. When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP
Morgan makes more money.

In short, there's a lot of money to be made in the fattening up of the American sheeple, and there is just too much momemtum, too much profits, and too much vested interest by too many entities to ever hope for any meaningful change to ever come about in our current political system based on balanced bullshit and perpetual peonage of We the Sheeple to the Fiat Usury Cartel.

In the mid-90's, Wal Mart first came to Hawaii in a town called Mililani, a small suburban community in the center of the island of O'ahu. For a short while, it was the number one Wal Mart in terms of sales in the entire country. (I only know this because an old high school friend worked there when they first opened).

People from all over the island would drive one to two hours just to go there to save a few bucks on toiletries, cleaning supplies and textiles made in China, that no other stores or chains anywhere else on the island could hope to compete with...not to mention it was the first store to remain open for business 24 hours a day here. The people of Hawaii went Wal Mart crazy the first few years they opened their doors here.

I remember one incident fairly well. I was at a different shopping center in the same town, and a car of local people pulled up to me as I was walking along the sidewalk, and asked me if I knew where the new Wal Mart was. They told me they were from Waimanalo - the far Eastern end of the island, a good 2 hours drive away at that time - and that they had never been to Mililani before.

To most folks in the USA Inc., 2 hours drive is literally nothing to ya'all. But on a small, densely populated island like O'ahu, two hours of driving through our winding, crowded and often gridlocked freeways and streets just to go to shopping at a store is not normal behavior.

I was amazed at how far these folks would drive just to shop at Wal Mart.

20 years later, we have Wal Marts, KMarts, Target, and Walgreens, and all sorts of National Chain super store/big box retailers all over, and nobody has to drive more than 15-20 minutes to get to one.

Prior to the arrival of these big National chain stores, Hawaii had a number of small, locally owned retail stores, some even family owned for several generations. Most of these are all gone now, and the one drug/sundries/retail chain that has been in business in Hawaii for a really long time and has a loyal following of locals that have kept it profitable in the face of big box competition, Longs Drugs, has been bought out by CVS.

Now Longs Drugs also had stores in California and a few other West Coast States, but in Hawaii, Longs has such a loyal customer base, it is the only place for which CVS opted to keep the name Longs Drugs for all it's stores, while all the Mainland stores have been changed to CVS.

This may seem like I'm going off on a tangent here, but stick with me for a bit more and you'll see what I'm getting at here with regards to this topic...

...anyhow, back when Wal Mart first opened, I remember shopping there pretty frequently, as I lived in a neighboring town at that time, about 10 minutes drive away. After a few years, I remember going into the store one day and noticed that they had started selling fresh produce. Not much, just a few crates of fruits and vegetables, and a single aisle of refrigerators selling a token amount of dairy and some processed meat products. At that time, I had also been to stores like Wal Mart, Target, Walgreens and other big box retailers on my trips to the mainland, and none of them carried fresh produce that I could remember.

Shortly thereafter, Longs Drugs followed suit, installing a very small "produce" section in the store. Like really small. A single, open air, refrigerated shelf, with a few heads of lettuce, apples, some processed American cheese slices, a few cartons of factory farmed eggs and some gallons of milk. I was always puzzled at why a store like Longs and Wal Mart, would have those dinky little produce sections...especially since that Wal Mart and nearly all Longs stores all over the island, were mostly located to prominent grocery store chains in their respective shopping centers.

I also noted that most of the time, this produce was of marginal quality and it usually looked like no one ever bought any of it, and it was almost never on sale and usually priced more expensive than the same produce brands and products found in any other Hawaiian grocery store. In fact, I even remember on a few occasions seeing Longs Drugs store employees loading up an entire cart of produce that had not sold and spoiled, and re-stocking the meager shelf with a new batch of most likely never-to-be-purchased produce.

I often wondered about the business decisions of a company like Longs Drugs and Wal Mart to waste floor space for a rinky-dink produce section, when they are immediately adjacent to popular grocery stores. Why would anyone buy there produce from a drug store or a Wal Mart?
Why do these stores even bother trying to sell such meager offerings
when customers need only walk 20 yards next door to a grocery store with
much better selection and variety of produce at better bargain prices?

Several months ago, it finally dawned on me when I was buying some batteries from Longs, and I was in line at the register, observing another victim of the American Obesity Pandemic, unloading her shopping cart of cases of soda, snack cakes, chips and twinkies... then I watched her pay for it with her EBT card.

Stores like Longs Drugs could care less if they had entire cases of lettuce, tomatoes, apples and bananas rot and get thrown away every few days, never selling a single bit of it.

As long as they offer a minimum amount of fresh produce, they can then accept EBT payments for the copious amounts of obesity-generating feed on sale in the profit aisle. Prior to the addition of a single small "produce aisle" I'm positive the old food stamps where not allowed to be used to purchase all the junk food stores like Longs Drugs had always sold. I now believe the switch over from the old food stamps to the electronically controlled EBT/SNAP system happened at around the exact same time all these stores started getting into the fresh produce business. It's positively diabolical, and most certainly deliberate.

Yes, my fellow food magic conspiritards, I am blaming the American deliberate obesity pandemic on the USDA-Big Ag-Junk Feed-EBT-Big-Box-Store Industrial complex. Then again, we need not try and create a long acronym or such a large hyphenated label for this dastardly and malevolent conspiracy. Just understand that it is all just various facets of the one big Company Store that rules our globalized, "fair-trade" world.

17 comments:

BTW---on 'fat acceptance' did you know that before the Roman Empire fell, there was an obesity epidemic and form of 'fat acceptance' too; caused by the 'free bread' policies they had instituted? I think this another sign of a civilization on the downward slope.

It's hard to believe that just 50 years ago, President Kennedy signed an Executive Order requiring physical fitness standards in the public schools as a condition of graduating. The PC mob repealed that back in the 90s, I think.

KG, I think you mean "Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms," not Michael Pollan, unless Pollan has taken a job with Salatin's business. I don't know, maybe he has. I haven't kept up with Pollan's work lately.

Food is one thing that should never, ever be given over to corporatist control. I don't care what kind of diet you want to eat: vegan, raw, paleo, WAP, just don't be SAD about it and you'll be fine. Sadly, I see a lot of people doing the exact things you mention, KG. Buying tons of junk food for no reason other than to feed an addiction* to unhealthy foods, for quick sugar highs, for boredom eating, for their kids because "the kids won't eat anything else." Piss poor excuse making, right there.

Follow the money, that's always the way.

*I do believe food addiction can exist. Big Ag doesn't fund food science programs at Big Uni for the hell of it, they want more people in their labs to engineer foods that will hit all of our pleasure centers and drive us to buy more.

I have one very, very picky eater in the house. Despite our efforts to be patient with her, our eldest just will not eat much of anything but bread, pasta, or chicken in nugget form. We haven't given in too much - I'll make homemade chicken nuggets for the kids, bake fresh bread for them, etc., but getting her to eat outside of that spectrum is difficult. I am sorely tempted, some days, to resort to junk food just to get her some calories, but I resist, and persist in getting her to open up her palate. How many parents take the easier way out, day in and day out, and do mac 'n cheese or Chef Boyardee just to avoid struggle with their kids?

This whole tangled web we're in is so evil. You can't point to one single thread on which to pull in order to free yourself, but surely if you start pulling on one, ANY one, the others will unravel. We do know, however, what spiders have spun this trap for us.

@ Eric- lozlozololz I think your right about who the guy is in that pic!

@ Finn - thanks, I get the exact same experiences all the time. People who remember me when I was 30 lbs overweight 6 years ago, refuse to believe me when I tell them how I eat now. Most people are unable to grasp just how badly we have been deceived by the establishment.

@ cranberry - thanks for the free editing! I think I mixed up Pollan and Salatin because I believe Pollan Wrote an article about PolyFace Farms I had read several years ago.

@ ton - not at all... That's why I'm still blogging. This place is where I get to discuss all the topics that are un-PC and largely verboten in polite company. But don't worry about me, I have plenty of friends and acquaintances irl.

Thought provoking... as someone who works with "food addicted clients" I can say food addiction IS real and any number of studies are supporting that statement. Scary how you linked it all up... but not unbelievable.

Philippines also has some walmart like western marts here, but luckily small retail stores and sari sari stores still survive and thank goodness I am yet to see a fat guy on a wheel chairOut Here people will really laugh at fat people and you will REALLY be called out and insulted, even by your relatives for being fat.thank God

Isn't it obvious? Like honey ants, those mountains of flab tooling around Walmart on electric scooters are our insurance against famine. Each holds up to half a million calories of fat and tender, little-used muscle, and unlike wild animals, no special equipment or skill is needed to catch them.

Occasional lurker and rarer commentator. Completely off topic, I couldn't find the contact link to send an email. Finally sold my house and am moving out of debt, I have some funds on hand. Before shtf, I was thinking my wife and I would make a trip to Hawaii. Any suggestions on a decent hotel value for money wise? I'm looking at early march next year.

Being on the other side of the country, I harbored the illusion that on the Hawaiian islands, people lived healthier, free of modern diet pitfalls. It's disappointing to learn that it's not like that and the problems we have here are there, too.

I'm not saying anything most of us don't already know, but the other reason for the obesity epidemic is to keep people sick but alive (at least until they can no longer pay into the system). For Big Pharma and Big Agra and their taxpayer funded shills in the government, there is no money to be made keeping people healthy. But there is tons of money to be made treating sick people, "managing cancer" etc.

Many people find help in Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. Some of us have been diagnosed as morbidly obese while others are undereaters. Among us are those who were severely bulimic, who have harmed themselves with compulsive exercise, or whose quality of life was impaired by constant obsession with food or weight. We tend to be people who, in the long-term, have failed at every solution we tried, including therapy, support groups, diets, fasting, exercise, and in-patient treatment programs.

FA has over 500 meetings throughout the United States in large and small cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Charlotte, Grand Rapids, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Austin, and Washington, D.C. Internationally, FA currently has groups in England, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Australia. If you would like more information about FA, please check out our website at www [dot] foodaddicts [dot] org. If there aren’t any meetings in your area, you can contact the office by emailing FA at foodaddicts [dot] org, where someone will help you.

Many people find help in Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. Some of us have been diagnosed as morbidly obese while others are undereaters. Among us are those who were severely bulimic, who have harmed themselves with compulsive exercise, or whose quality of life was impaired by constant obsession with food or weight. We tend to be people who, in the long-term, have failed at every solution we tried, including therapy, support groups, diets, fasting, exercise, and in-patient treatment programs.

FA has over 500 meetings throughout the United States in large and small cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Charlotte, Grand Rapids, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Austin, and Washington, D.C. Internationally, FA currently has groups in England, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Australia. If you would like more information about FA, please check out our website at www [dot] foodaddicts [dot] org. If there aren’t any meetings in your area, you can contact the office by emailing FA at foodaddicts [dot] org, where someone will help you.